Anglo Visions

The Who Know Who They Are and From Whence They Came

[18.Jul.06] :. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. Warner revisits the Live at Leeds legacy courtesy of the Who.

Prime Location: How Sitcom Settings Add to the Fun

[14.Jun.06] :. As British sitcoms move higher on the endangered species list, a small number of successful programs are relying on geographic familiarity to attract (and maintain) UK viewers.

Passion as Fashion? Rock Meets Religion on Manchester’s Streets

[23.May.06] :. Manchester united around something other than soccer on Good Friday, as rock, religion and theatre came together for a unique presentation of Christ's crucifixion.

Designs on Democracy

[20.Apr.06] :. On The Great British Design Quest a new sort of made-for-TV entertainment/culture show, the best that Britain has to offer is at the mercy of the masses.

Get on the Scene, Now

[20.Mar.06] :. Leeds, and the nearby cities of Sheffield and Wakefield, are part of a musical renaissance. Warner talks with members of two bands from the area, each with contrasting views on this new 'scene'.

Still Howling: A Poem for Then and Now

[30.Sep.05] :. If Elvis Presley fuelled a visceral revolution, Allen Ginsberg lit the blue-touch paper on an intellectual one.

Buccaneers Leave Manchester Disunited

[31.Aug.05] :. In an effort to add to their respective toy chests, moguls are getting their kicks out of soccer by turning the proud pastime into a sport of corporate acquisition.

Danger Ahead? Proceed at Your Own Risk

[1.Aug.05] :. Dark humour and troubling times cross paths as a harbinger of things to come.

Media Mainstream? There’s Still an Alternative

[23.Jun.05] :. All the news that's fit to print -- at least fit to print outside the publishing mainstream -- the alternative newspaper is alive and well on both sides of the pond.

We Can Meet Heroes

[23.May.05] :. Hero worship and chance encounters can pay dividends... but you'd best know the Clash from the Pistols.

Sitting in the Shadows of Giants

[4.May.05] :. Lessons learned from a squash club spanking and visit to Maggie's flat help an intrepid journalist stand tall and be intimidated no more.

Return to Genre? Beware Misleading Signs

[23.Mar.05] :. An exploration into musical genre-bending; things are not always as they sound.

Pop’s Same Name Fame Games

[16.Feb.05] :. Is it imitation? Is it flattery? Is it postmodern homage when a band's name is a play on another's that has gone, most famously, before?

Past Pal Bears New Year Present

[19.Jan.05] :. The UK never really had that rather endearing US tradition surrounding yearbooks, proms and 'Class of' reunions. UK state schools did not encourage the alumni culture that the American educational system so enthusiastically sustains. Friends Reunited may be changing that.

Moving Home: Two Transatlantic Tales

[15.Dec.04] :. Warner converses with two reverse migration musicians, Preston Reed and Gabriel Minnikin, who have moved away from North America to live and work in more ancient lands.

Radio Head? Ex-pirate Peel Abandons Ship

[1.Dec.04] :. John Peel retained a fondness for music of all periods. The unearthing of undiscovered performers and undersung genres appeared to be his unceasing motivation.

Now He’s 64: A Late Lennon Landmark

[27.Oct.04] :. Sixty-four-year-olds aren't what they used to be, and if John Lennon were still alive, he would probably not be living the quaint parlour scene played out in McCartney's ditty.

Mercury’s Message: Low Key, High Quality

[29.Sep.04] :. The Mercury Prize helps spread the gospel of talented UK musicians beyond the confines of their homeland, without over-the-top, Grammy-like showboating.

Politicians: Beware the Power of Rock

[25.Aug.04] :. When a giant of the rock industry like Bruce Springsteen weighs in with his tuppence worth, tens of thousands of ordinary voters feel they are being offered the benefit of impartial common sense from a source they can trust.

Better Red Than Dead

[28.Jul.04] :. In comedy, wherein nothing is sacred, where do we draw the line between witty repartee and savage satire?

That Old Devil Called Dance

[23.Jun.04] :. Dancing, in so many situations, represents something that is threatening to civilisation's natural order: the uncoiling of our trussed-up desires played out in public, a triumph of the visceral over the cerebral, the unwelcomed victory of the hip over the head.

Almost Cooke’s Century: A Transatlantic Pioneer Moves On

[26.May.04] :. A tribute to Alistair Cooke and a recollection of his influence on Warner's life.

Put Another Nickel In

[28.Apr.04] :. John Lennon's Swiss-made, KB Discomatic can now be seen and heard with this TV programme and CD, and it's a beautiful thing.

No Sikth Please, We’re British

[31.Mar.04] :. What happens when high culture meets low, high art meets popular, establishment meets street, funded meets fundless? At Fuse, it's a culture clash.

Is Women’s Work Finally Done?

[10.Mar.04] :. Britain is nonetheless witnessing the steady rise of a collection of youthful female challengers who might just catch the attention of American ears before the year is out.

Media Mayhem in England

[28.Jan.04] :. Those latterday Citizen Kanes -- continue to believe that a policy of chop and change, axe and launch, re-think, re-design and rally, is the best means to hold our attention.

Get Naked? Why Not Let It Be?

[7.Jan.04] :. Has anyone the right to take an existing document and resurrect it in this manner?

Jailhouse Pop

[12.Nov.03] :. Nothing adds a more notable notch to your studded belt, nothing sharpens the spurs on your blue-suede shoes better, than a bit of disorderly disrespect for the social code.

Ready, Steady, Goth

[7.Oct.03] :. Just as the sounds on the dance floor borrow from Detroit and Trenchtown, Bombay and Cape Town, so those who groove to them take their sartorial vision, their individual style, from something closer to multiculture than subculture.

Laughing Matters?

[11.Sep.03] :. Have we maybe now entered that post-modern world where sophisticated audiences can 'read' the levels of a joke without being corrupted by the main text?

Cleveland Heights, A City of Culture and Contrasts

[14.Aug.03] :. . . . in the midst of difference -- wealth and education here, poverty and despair just over there -- Americans retain an essential respect for the symbols of the city, the physical pillars of the nation.

Skiffle and the English “Elvis”

[9.Jul.03] :. Anglo Visions -- Skiffle and the English 'Elvis' -- Suffice it to say that without Donegan's 'Rock Island Line', it is highly unlikely that the greatest band of all would ever have emerged.

Right and Wrongs: The Return of the Anti-Nazi League

[18.Jun.03] :. This conjunction, a Prime Minister with a falling rating and a spineless Parliamentary opposition, has again wedged the door ajar for the British National Party, the current incarnation of the National Front.

Canon Fodder?

[7.May.03] :. You can count your life not through T.S. Eliot's coffee spoons, but through crucial sax solos and critical Scorcese sequences.

Rock in the Academy

[9.Apr.03] :. Few are stunted or stultified by the need to think about and analyse where rock or reggae or rave fits into the cultural landscape.

Genesis and Revelations: From the Midlands to Manhattan

[12.Mar.03] :. (I)t soon became apparent that the Megsons took a slightly less conventional approach to life.

Rock and Reality: How TV and Pop Got It Together

[12.Feb.03] :. The young starlets rocketed from obscurity to celebrity overnight also seem likely to return to obscurity, carrying the embarrassing ignominy of their brief TV fame, with them.

Death Row: A View from the Cheap Seats

[8.Jan.03] :. . . .when you personally pass Jimi's age or John's, or Buddy's or Elvis', you realise just how fleetingly they basked in the limelight, and how briefly the candle of your own existence flairs then flickers.

California Dreaming: US Band Plans British Invasion

[6.Nov.02] :. He was seeking advice on how an unknown Yankee combo could approach the mysteries of this tiny island and not leave with their tail between their legs.

Rock Writing and Sports Writing: Aesthetics vs. Athletics

[16.Oct.02] :. (Richard Williams) felt, when he hung up his pop pen, that he'd almost run out of words to meaningfully apply to music.

No Smoke Without Fear

[11.Sep.02] :. I hope, John, they do have celestial ashtrays in the next place.

Titanic Efforts, But UK Acts Fail to Bridge Great Divide

[14.Aug.02] :. Once our groups struck the Union Jack at the summit; now they stumble among the loose scree of the lower slopes.

Lad Mags and Dangerous, You Know: The Risk That Rolling Stone Takes

[10.Jul.02] :. Anglo Visions -- Lad Mags and Dangerous, You Know: The Risk That Rolling Stone Takes -- In the hands of the new breed of editors, style and gloss, surface and glamour, beat everything: bigger, deeper, harder, harsher matters cower in the shadow of the flash, the superficial, the vacuous, the ephemerally amusing.

Pop Goes the Palace but Pistols Remain in Exil

[12.Jun.02] :. The chances of Osbourne biting the head off a live corgi -- the toy dog that has been the hearthside symbol of the latterday Windsors -- were maybe remote, but it is worth remembering that other members of the invited bill have not always toed the line themselves.

The Haçienda Must Be Re-filmed

[15.May.02] :. Here is a man who, almost single-handedly, wrested the UK rock crown from Liverpool . . . and made Manchester . . . the undisputed heavyweight of British sub-cultural credibility.

Major setback: Is time up for EMI?

[10.Apr.02] :. . . . but since the de-merger from Thorn in 1996, it has looked a rather lonely whale in a sea of increasingly hungry sharks.

Centre of Attraction? How a UK Pop Dream Died

[13.Mar.02] :. Yet the project raises rather difficult memories of a similar scheme that Britain tried to get off the ground . . .

Friends and NME

[13.Feb.02] :. Now that the Woodstock clan had been joined by the Live Aid generation, rock had almost picked up its pipe and slippers.

Lies, damned lies, and end of year polls

[9.Jan.02] :. The old Broadway show gag comes to mind, 'No one liked it, only the public'.

Harcourt, McRae and T-T: The Return of the Neurotic Boy Outside

[20.Nov.01] :. These Neurotic Boy Outsiders have coped in different ways with the poisoned chalice of their own, often media-shaped image as restless, difficult and highly individual artists.

Rights and Wrongs: TV Traumas Overshadow English Football Fervour

[24.Oct.01] :.

The football season—the soccer season, that is—began in August in England amid an ever-swelling tide of hyperbole as sport, that great vehicle of social democracy in the latter decades of the 19th century, becomes a postmodern amalgam of Greek heroism and financial skullduggery, ethics and aesthetics melded to sex scandals, drug outrage and rock soundtracks. Television rights have just switched hands in the UK.  The ad-free BBC, after more than 35 years of virtually uninterrupted Saturday evening match highlights, has been outbid by ITV.  The grouping of commercial companies and the vast figures involved in the deal mean that the new heirs to the televised game have got to make maximum impact. Reputations are on the line: the viewing figures have to stack up.

But on the first weekend, as ITV presented an early evening Saturday show, the biggest media story concerned the comfortable ratings victory…